Amidst the product introductions of the National Association of Broadcasters Show being held in Las Vegas, Adobe announced yesterday that it will be releasing a media player for both the Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.
Designed as a standalone desktop version of the company’s Flash Player web browser plug-in, Adobe Media Player is based on the recently released Apollo platform and is expected to go into beta later this year with the final product arriving towards the end of the 2007 calendar year according to Wired.
Adobe’s Flash Player, which holds a strong market share, is expected to grow, the company gambling on this as major sites such as YouTube rely heavily on the Flash Player format. The desktop version will be compete against Windows Media Player and contain similar digital rights management protections as the ones found in Microsoft’s Media Player in order to appease what the company terms “content publishers”.
Adobe Media Player will incorporate featres such as RSS subscriptions, online and offline video playback, on-demand streaming, live streaming, progressive download and protected download-and-play.
Two features that may prove controversial with the upcoming software are a mechanism that will embed advertising in downloaded clips in a manner that can’t be separated from the content. The second, termed a “security” model, will tie downloaded content to specific machines or users. The company has also announced that it will boost video fidelity on its Flash video format, albeit specific details are sparse for the time being.

On Sunday, Apple introduced Final Cut Pro, the newest edition of its video production suite as well as new version of its component programs; Final Cut Pro 6, Soundtrack 2, Compressor 3, Motion 3 and a new program called Color.
The suite, which is priced at US$1,299 for the full version and US$499 for the upgrade version from Final Cut Studio to Final Cut Studio 2. Upgrades from Final Cut Pro to Final Cut Studio 2 will run US$699 according to The Mac Observer.
The new version, which hits the shelves in May, offers the following new features and fixes:
-Final Cut Pro 6 has gained the ability to mix and match most video formats as well as their frame rates in a single timeline without transcording. The program now supports ProRes 422, 10-bit 4:2:2 post production format that can create HD quality files at SD file sizes, a SmoothCam feature that removes camera movement and the ability to edit Motion templates.
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On Monday, Microsoft introduced video professionals attending the NAB conference Silverlight, a Mac and PC-compatible web browser plug-in similar to Adobe’s Flash paired with what the company considered video streaming superior to Apple’s QuickTime. The program, which is currently available as a public beta (or “technology preview”), is available for download with a general release planned later this month according to Macworld News.
Previously known as WPF/E, Silverlight is designed around vector-based graphics, text, animation, media and overlays while using existing back-end web and infrastructure tools such as Apache, PHP, JavaScript and XHTML. On the Mac end, Microsoft has stated that the plug-in works with both Firefox and Safari while on the Windows end the plug-in is designed around Internet Explorer 7.
Looking to charge out of the gate upon release, Microsoft has already contracted with several marquee names to distribute content such as Akamai Technologies, Brightcove, Eyeblaster, Major League Baseball and Netflix. The company has also created a Windows-only content development suite called Expression, which is being offered as an alternative to the recently-released Adobe Creative Suite 3.
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